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We will only see each other occasionally, he says, but each time will be like our first time — a celebration. She listens to him attentively and nods. I can only be a luxury for you, because I am a married man. I know, she says. Perhaps that won’t be enough for you, he says. I understand that. She looks him straight in the face, there is a ring of yellow around her pupils, he now sees. I’m not just married, I’m also in a relationship with a woman who works in radio. If you had a thousand women, she says, all that matters is the time that we get to spend together. How can he ever refuse her anything, if she doesn’t demand anything? The black velvet ribbon moves him, it makes her look like a schoolgirl. If he doesn’t manage to say quickly what he needs to say, it’ll be too late. And you can’t expect any sort of public acknowledgment — I know, and you know, and that will have to do. That’s fine, she says, and smiles. Where terms and conditions are set, there is a future. All yesterday and today she was afraid he would just toss her out.
From now on, he thinks, the responsibility for their existence is entirely hers. He has to protect himself from himself. Maybe she’s a monster?
She thinks, he wants to prepare me for difficult times ahead. He wants to protect me. Protect me from myself, and so he gives me the power of decision over us.
He thinks, as long as she wants us, it won’t be wrong.
She thinks, if he leaves everything to me, then he’ll see what love means.
He thinks, she won’t understand what she’s agreed to until much later.
And she, he’s putting himself in my hands.
All these things are thought on this evening, and all together they make up a many-faceted truth.
At six o’clock that evening Hans is in such a hurry to hold her in his arms again he only barely remembers to shut the front door. And yet — by some fluke they have the whole night ahead of them — he is determined to be patient. And she keeps her silver glittering jacket on. He brews Turkish coffee, he put the Rotkäppchen on ice a couple of hours ago. Before long, two cups and two glasses are perched on the headboard among the books, when they lie down on the conjugal bed, though he doesn’t call it that, he calls it a lovers’ couch. There is kissing, but for the moment nothing more, they drink Rotkäppchen, they drink coffee, they embrace, she squirms with pleasure at his touch, but he still hasn’t taken off her little silver jacket. The past week has taught him to wait. It almost killed me, he says, waiting for you, but at the same time I think the pain did me good. She pulls his head down to her and kisses him. Yesterday morning I booked us a table in the Schinkelstube — probably to extort your return from the gods.
Command economy, she says, what a good idea, and she kisses him some more.
I was afraid, he says.
So was I, she very seriously replies.
That strange word “believe,” with “lie” in it, is still going through her head when he has pulled down the straps of her dress, and spun her around, the dress slips over her narrow hips to the floor, and she’s standing in front of him in a little white slip. On the way to the couch they walk hand in hand through the dark corridor, and pause for a moment in front of the large mirror.
Do you suppose a mirror remembers all the people it’s ever reflected?
Maybe, he replies, but you know I — I will remember the picture of you in this mirror as long as I live.
So will I, she replies.
And they go on.
When they part very early the next morning, he is instructed by her to buy pepper and breadcrumbs. Padlizsán, says Katharina, but she won’t tell him what it is in German, it’s to be a surprise. Tomorrow they are planning to cook together, Ingrid and Ludwig will be away at a summer party in the Uckermark. Ingrid knows her husband isn’t keen on such festivities, just stay home, why don’t you, she said. Who knows, maybe she’s planning to meet someone there herself. Years ago now, the couple made a joint decision not to watch each other too closely. Only they didn’t want to make it public, lest it seem too much of a slight to either party. Is there enough wine in the house? When he woke up this morning, he called her his darling, and she reciprocated.
So they tell each other — and tell themselves — everything about the way it was, three weeks ago, when they first met. Some things they both know, some one of them has forgotten, or the other, some one of them didn’t notice, or the other, some one of them thought but didn’t say, and some the other, and so what was present just three weeks ago deepens in the course of an afternoon, deepens, changes its nature, and yet keeps its overall outline which both of them recognize.
You said this could go on as long as I want, and now I don’t want. That’s what Katharina will say when he finally gets through to her when she’s back in Berlin, he’s almost certain of it now. Can you help me?, the damned cork broke off. No, he can’t help Ingrid with her cork just now, he needs all his concentration to keep the inaudible sentence in check, the one that goes: and now I don’t want. You’ll manage, he says, and stays in his seat by the window. He senses the silence suddenly thickening in the room, but he doesn’t care, his desire hasn’t sounded like Mozart for days now either. Why are you in such a bad mood? And now I don’t want. Or the phone rings, and no one picks it up. Sorry, what? Why are you in such a bad mood. I’m not in a bad mood. And now I don’t want it. He can think of three to five reasons why it should be that way. Why would she even bother picking up his letter from the post office? Well, as long as you’re sitting pretty. He needs to get through one more week on the Baltic, while the girl readjusts to a life in Berlin in which he no longer figures. Would you stop quarreling please, says Ludwig. We’re not quarreling, says Hans.
Barbara is the name of the waitress at the Arkade. She’s tall, and taller when she puts her hair up. Two coffees and two glasses of Rotkäppchen, please, Barbara. A celebration. It’s their third 11th day, their trimensual anniversary, and if Katharina had a wish, then she would wish that fate never ran out of elevens. Nine years, three years. How long will she and Hans be good for? Is what they have nothing but a so-called affair? Will he be sitting with someone else in ten years’ time, showing off a snapshot of her, Katharina, and saying: that was Katharina, she was my lover? How to endure the way that the present trickles down moment by moment and becomes the past? So why did he show her the photos? Of course he’s been with other women, he’s been around that much longer. Even she’s had three or four others, plus Gernot. What makes her so jealous is the secrecy around the other women, the trouble Hans must have gone to to keep each relationship going: rubbing the lipstick off a wineglass after a meeting in his apartment, or telling Ingrid, we were working late in the office, using her hairdresser’s appointment for a phone call or taking advantage of a moment at night when the wife’s gone to bed to whisper into the telephone: O darling, O beautiful, O sweetheart. The way he does now, with me. Little Ludwig was revolted by it, she recalls. And isn’t he right to be? And now she’s a part of this tissue of deceit. And even thinks of these little treacheries of Hans’ as a distinction. Not long ago, when Hans went to the cinema with Ludwig, she sat three rows behind them, just to have some proximity to the man she loves. In the general crush when everyone filed out, Hans brushed against her hand.
Two weeks ago, when Ingrid was taking Hans’s jacket to the dry cleaner’s, she found a passport photo of Katharina in the inside pocket and wouldn’t talk to him for three days. He didn’t tell Katharina. In October Katharina cried for the first time about the fact that he was married, and in November for the second time, and since then he’s avoided mentioning Ingrid’s name. And if Katharina now sometimes looks deadly earnest, he knows she’s making an effort and is repressing something she ought really to talk about. Anything the matter? No. Because everything is avoided that might make one or other of them sad, sadness suddenly comes to occupy a lot of space between them. He is old enough to know how the end likes to set its roots first imperceptibly, then ever more boldly, in the present. Without my marriage I wouldn’t be the man I am. That’s what he told Regina as well, the newscaster, and Marjut, the Finn. They went along with it until he’d had enough. Where Katharina is concerned, the sentence carries a different meaning, but she would deny it if he were to write it to her. Without his marriage, there wouldn’t be the danger, the secrecy, the circumstances that give rise to yearning. Not the content of their love, but factors that energize and quicken it. Just as if/ in a gallop/ an exhausted mare/ thirsted for the nearest well. Thirsting. Another one of those dead words. The marriage that threatens and attenuates their affair is also the ground that nourishes it. And probably, if Hans were honest, the other way around as well. Wasn’t Ingrid — when at the end of three silent days she started to speak again, and during the ensuing scene to cry, and when the makeup ran down her face and she picked up the nearest thing that came to hand, which happened to be a clothes brush, and threw it out of the window into the yard — wasn’t Ingrid in her desperation more beautiful and desirable than she’d appeared to him in a long time?
[...] She knows that it’s perfectly possible that while she’s asleep he’s maybe writing the sentences that will sunder them. Just when the bill for everything is due, just before their wishes become reality, everything is once more up for grabs, teetering at the top and maybe about to collapse, she knows that. Yesterday, he fell asleep with her, two spoons on the narrow bed, and she thought she had never been happier in her life. But sometimes he clings on to her too hard. Sometimes he says: I feel tense — and that means she has to take her clothes off. And other times it’s so perfect she could die. What does she want from him? She laughed herself silly the other day when he put forward their alphabet soup, Noodle ABC, for the State Literary Prize. And in the shower, the way he rubs away at his eyes with the washcloth like a little boy. Does she love him because he’s really a child, despite being ostensibly thirty-four years older? He thought he was addicted to her, he wrote not long ago, and she thought, no, she’s addicted to making him addicted. Is whatever she is and has enough to keep him? And what is she exactly?